Laura Johns:
0:00 Hey I’m Laura Johns: founder and CEO of The Business Growers. We serve maintenance services providers and IT companies with ROI driven marketing. Jonathan Mast is the founder of White Beard Strategies. His company helps empower businesses and entrepreneurs establish themselves as the leading authority in their niche by answering questions to the exact topics that Google wants you to know to be able to answer to become the go to expert in your industry.
We are thrilled to bring you this. The title today is Modernizing your MSP with AI. Of course, whatever type of business you own, there are so many resources and tools that we can be using, and we’re going to be talking through that today regardless of what your particular business type is– this will apply.
I serve many service providers. I know that Jonathan has a couple of clients that are in the MSP, IT industry. We’re going to specifically be talking about that for the most part, but again, take these principles and apply them to your business, regardless of what your business is.
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining. I’m so excited that you’re here. I feel like you’re a bit of an AI celebrity, so thank you for being here today.
Jonathan Mast:
1:11 You’re way too kind. Thank you, Laura. I appreciate the invitation and hopefully we can just add some value to your audience today.
Laura Johns:
I have met a number of people in our industry that some have dipped their toe into to an extent.
Some are not prepared to do that yet; others are what I would consider advanced in their use of AI in this industry. I really want to assume, let’s just say for the sake of starting from the very beginning, that maybe we haven’t done a whole lot in the AI realm as it relates to our businesses, efficiencies in our business, and making improvements.
So let’s just start at the beginning. Where does AI fit? Is there a place for AI among managed services providers and IT companies? Let’s just talk about that for a minute and tell me if any business is wanting to improve their efficiency with AI, what does that look like? I know, personally, having worked with a lot of clients in this industry, it’s really easy to stay head down and stay in the weeds.
What are some tips, tools, and tricks that you can give us, particularly as it relates to how AI fits in this industry?
Jonathan Mast:
2:25 Well, great question. I’m biased, but I absolutely believe that AI can be a great tool to help MSPs really in three key areas. One is to save time, both for the key players, as well as their teams. It can make you more productive and that productivity leads to improved margins and better profitability. The really cool thing about AI, and I believe this from the bottom of my heart, and have done this with so many clients, Laura, is that while you’re saving time and making more money, we can actually deliver more value to your clients at the same time.
We all know that in the MSP market, churn is not something that is always prevalent, but it’s always something we’re trying to guard against. We want to make sure that we’re doing our best to make our customers stick around. They’re not looking for the greener grass on the other side of the road, because it never is.
By delivering more value to them, it’s a great way to just set yourself apart from your competition and truly outshine them in every way so that your customer never even thinks about looking for greener grass.
Laura Johns:
3:29 I’d like to get a show of hands, so maybe if you could just leave in the comments right now, if you have already started using AI in your business. A lot of people in the room probably haven’t started, many who have, and some a little bit in between.
So where do we start? What’s the first step if we’re trying to figure out where to start with AI? Let’s just say we’ve never done it before. Where do we start?
Jonathan Mast:
The first thing to do is to sign up for an account with ChatGPT.
There’s a lot of engines out there. There’s a lot of different things and we can talk about all of them, but my recommendation literally to everyone is go sign up for ChatGPT and don’t even debate about paying them the $20. You don’t have to do it, but there’s so much value. If you’re doing this for your business, skip a coffee for a couple of days and pay the $20 a month.
4:30 You get so many more features, especially that from an MSP perspective that are going to help you out because we’re busy. We’re slammed. We don’t have time. Like you said, we’re heads down on what we’re doing, but ChatGPT is going to give us the ability to do all of the major things that we need to do to figure out how to leverage AI.
It’s the leading-large-language model, meaning we can talk to it. We can prompt it. We can give it advice and get advice back from it. It’s huge for that. We can talk about ways to do that. We can use our voice with it. In other words, we can literally talk to it. While you’re head down working on a security issue in a data center, at some server rack, you can turn your phone on and start talking to it. It’ll talk back to you sometimes like your kids, but normally in a respectful way and be able to give you the information that’s relevant. It also supports a vision at that point, and vision through ChatGTP is the ability to take a picture of something.
5:29 Let’s just say you’re looking at a chart and you’re trying to figure it out. You can take a picture of it, send it to ChatGPT, and ask it to tell you what’s there or maybe how to make things better. It’ll do that.
It supports the voice and the text. It also supports data analysis at that point, and data analysis is massive. You’ve got a bunch of data coming in from a network report or security report, and you need to analyze that. We know it’s hard to go through a lot of pages of data.
Now you don’t have to, but you can literally upload that spreadsheet or PDF directly into ChatGPT. Now imagine having a conversation with somebody that knows everything in that report, and you just have to ask him and he’ll give you their answers. It’s just like that.
Laura Johns:
16:17 I love that you said that you should assume you’re talking to someone who knows everything because it [AI] does.
It’s just figuring out the prompting, and I think that’s what we get the most nervous about. I know our team– we actually are building prompts appropriately for our MSP and IT clients. We have prompts that we know work better than others to get the best results.
I think I mentioned this to you the other day, but I was driving to a doctor’s appointment a few days ago and needed to figure out a naming convention for a new set of services for a client, so I started literally having a conversation with it since I was driving. This makes me think that we should look at it like it’s a first date. Maybe you’re a little nervous or maybe we’ve never done AI before.
We don’t know how to talk to ChatGPT, but let’s assume that when we start the conversation, they’re an expert in whatever we want to know about. Let’s just have an open dialogue like we would on a first date.
Jonathan Mast:
7:13 One of the things I encourage people to do is the word “prompting”. It intimidates people, and it shouldn’t be.
Just insert the word texting instead. We all text our friends, our spouse, our family, and it’s really the same way; just as if you were giving instructions. I had to give some instructions earlier today to my 16 year old son, so I texted him. Why? Because that’s the way to get his attention.
I’m in my office, and he’s literally across the hall and doing his virtual high school. I texted him, and I didn’t just say hey go clean the dishes. I texted him exactly what I wanted to be done. Why? Because he’s 16 years old and he’s going to find the fastest way possible to get out of every job I give him, so I gave him details on exactly what I wanted done step by step. And guess what?
He’ll then do that. It’ll be great. It’ll be exactly what I wanted. If I just said, go take the trash out, there’s a possibility the trash wouldn’t be in the trash bin. There’s a possibility he’d leave the trash bin and everything in it in the garage. It could get thrown out the window.
Laura Johns:
8:12 You didn’t give him specifics, right? It could just get thrown out the window.
Jonathan Mast:
He would follow the letter of what I type, and ChatGPT is going to do the same thing.
One of the biggest mistakes we make is thinking that ChatGPT can read our mind. If your spouse can’t read your mind and your business partner can’t read your mind, then neither can ChatGPT.
We need to tell it what we want. We all see these guides to “buy my list of 387 prompts for managed services providers.” Save your money and don’t buy those. You’re not going to get value out of them. Don’t go out and buy a lot of courses because every course was done at least a week or two ago, if not a year ago, and they’re not being updated.
Now, if you find a course that’s getting updated all the time, that may be different, so instead, learn a prompt framework in IY. We follow SOPs, right? Learn a prompt framework. We have three steps that we recommend for everybody. The first is tell it how you want it to act.
9:15 If I’m looking for data analysis on a report, I’m gonna tell it that you’re an expert IT Systems engineer or something like that, and you have special proficiencies in doing data analysis.
I’m going to upload this report, and I’m going to ask you questions about the report. I want you to respond with the most accurate information you can.
Now we’ve told it who it is and what we want it to do, so the third part is the most important and everybody forgets it, even myself.
10:03 The reason that last part is so important is that AI tools, in order not to frustrate us all, have been taught to assume things.
In other words, they’re taught that if you don’t give it enough information, fill in the blanks and make assumptions. That’s also unfortunately why a lot of people use AI and they go, well, that was junk because they didn’t have enough information. However, by basically telling it upfront: ask me clarifying questions, ChatGPT will analyze who it said you were, who you wanted it to be, and what you want it to do.
Then it’ll say, I need more information. You don’t have to be the person to remember, you can just say that I need these three bits of information. You can give it to them, and then it gives you a response.
Laura Johns:
10:44 My therapist actually told me one time that it’s good practice to ask your spouse.
What do you need from me so that I can get what I need from you?
It’s the same concept. You just have to ask, what do you need from me so that I can get what I’m trying to get out of you. I think that people who just dabble in working with ChatGPT and then give up on it is because they’re not putting in the time and the effort to be specific so you’re not getting the results you need.
Honestly, that to me, is a basic principle of business. Same with the team that I work with every day. If I’m not communicating effectively, then the end result is not going to be the quality and up the standards that I want. I think it’s exactly that way with ChatGPT as well.
Jonathan Mast:
11:41 You wouldn’t hire a new technician and just turn them loose on your clients major network without giving them a little bit of insight, right? You have to give a little bit of training and we have to do the same with ChatGPT.
Laura Johns:
12:16 I think for anybody who has started an adventure with ChatGPT, this is really good feedback to make sure that we are at least doing that the right way. I want to move just for a minute into talking about clients.
A lot of times we only look at things through the lens of what can this do for our business and what can this do for me with operational efficiencies, but there are lots of use cases where maintenance services providers and IT companies can leverage AI to improve their communication with their clients.
A lot of times when we do keep our heads down in the business, we’re putting out buyers, we’re fixing an outage, something like that. It’s really hard to prioritize client communication and customer satisfaction overall as its own entity because we’re so head down in the weeds.
How can AI technologies be utilized to personalize our client interactions and make them feel more human-like, even if it’s not?
Jonathan Mast:
13:16 I think there’s a couple of different ways that allows us to do this. The first one I want to point out is probably the one that everybody uses multiple times a day.
Like you said, our heads are down. We’re pushing hard, and we’re running fast. A lot of times we should take more than 12 seconds to write an email in order to respond to a client, but we just don’t have time. Instead, we just fire off an email and assume that they’re going to get it, and that it’s fine and covered.
Instead of doing that, take 12 seconds to fire off the email, but before you press send, send it over to ChatGPT and say: please proofread and rewrite for improved readability. That’s it. Just proofread and rewrite for improved readability then you’re going to get an email that’s probably three to four hundred times better than what you were going to send.
It took you an extra 5 seconds, but now you’ve got something that your client’s going to appreciate because we’ve all had clients get frustrated because we don’t communicate well enough or, despite our efforts, they’re not communicating as well as they want and make themselves feel heard. The other thing that I think it’s great for is some of the marketing things that just need to happen that we don’t do.
14:16 I think one of the big ones is just sending out a newsletter or posting on social media. These are just basic ways to communicate with clients and to communicate our expertise and ChatGPT, and when I say that, you could use Bart or Claude or other tools as well, but ChatGPT allows you that ability to go, “I’m a managed IT services provider. I need a post or three posts for this week that I can put out that’ll help promote what I do without sounding sales oriented.”
And guess what? ChatGPT will give you ideas. It may not write the whole post, but it’ll give you the ideas. You have the knowledge, the expertise. If I came to you, Laura, and I said, all right, as an IT services professional, give me three reasons why I should consider outsourcing my IT. You don’t need to be prompted on what to say with that answer, right? However, you may not think about the question because in your mind you’re thinking this is why we’re gonna do that: so it can be the other is email newsletters.
15:11 I don’t know how many of you do email newsletters. I won’t ask for a show because I know it’s a pain, but they’re so important because your email list is a way to nurture your clients to keep them involved with marketing automation tools that are available. If you don’t know, talk to Laura about those tools because she and her team can tell you. You can create amazing nurture campaigns that just stay in touch with your clients and remind them one, that you exist and two, that you care.
By focusing on that, we can turn something that used to be long, arduous, and maybe never got done, into something that now gets done and then again. That increases customer satisfaction and our lifetime value with the clients because satisfied customers spend more money and buy more upsells. So it’s a great three: social media drip campaigns, email automations, and just email in general are three ways that every MSP can likely utilize AI probably today before the end of the day.
Laura Johns:
16:16 I’ll add to that. Our team is really geeking out right now just on the power of AI for search engine optimization.
Obviously we’re using a combination of different tools, but when you really see a significant acceleration is when you’re able to take keywords that we research and know in this market. These are the keywords you need to rank for taking those keywords and letting ChatGPT, other platforms, or a combination of a few things we have to see the sauce to our method for sure.
Being able to understand what and how Google thinks is important so that we can produce the best content based on what we want to rank for. We’ve been really excited about what we’ve been able to produce, and again, we were doing it anyway. Now we’re still able to do it with human touch and people involved but do it so much faster and deliver really fast results for our clients, which has been exciting to see.
Jonathan Mast:
17:17 Well, that’s been exciting to see the way you’ve brought that into your agency. Again, the same thing we’re talking about for MSPs is saving time and improving margins, but you’re delivering more value at the same time. That’s what the clients care about. Clients aren’t worried if you make a little more money than you made last month as long as they feel they’ve gotten more value for it.
These tools allow you to do that because they amplify your expertise. Laura, if we gave that same prompt series to my 16 year old who doesn’t know marketing, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to optimize an article, write SEO content, or do SEO well with that, but your team already has the expertise, so it amplifies that and the same for an MSP.
It can amplify those existing skills. You have somebody writing you an email that wants to understand something about cybersecurity, but you don’t have the time to give them a great answer. Instead of giving them a great answer, do what I do, and grab your phone.
When you open ChatGPT, there’s a little microphone at the bottom, press it and say your answer into it. Then when it’s done, part of your answer is “write this for me” so I can respond to this client. You can put your phone down and go back to your computer. Then five minutes later, not that it took ChatGPT that long, you can go back and decide, “yep, that’s good.” Now you can copy and paste that in, take a few seconds to review it, and send it out.
Laura Johns:
18:38 I love that you were just talking about communication with clients through email because again, when we’re head down, we miss the importance of communicating and letting the clients know that we care with just constant, ongoing touch in some way through email, marketing, and communication, to just stay in front.
A lot of people say email is dead. I don’t want to hear it because to me, we’re able to monitor how many clicks you’re getting. You’re getting activity, you’re getting response, and that is meaningful. If you’re able to communicate with your clients, in a short period of time, by utilizing these tools, you may never really know the value of how it might be strengthening that lifetime value or how it might be strengthening that client relationship. But, I can guarantee that it’s really powerful.
I just love the thought of using it more. When you think about a client’s communication with AI, you just think about it like a chatbot. There’s so much more than just a chatbot. Of course, that’s a good one too, but there’s so much more than a chatbot.
Jonathan Mast:
19:43 Well, and if I can, Laura, I’d like to reiterate real quick, and if not, you just made something that’s really important, and for marketing in general, but everybody assumes that if they don’t get a response on their content that it didn’t have any value.
I want to tell you from personal experience alone, I have closed so much business from people that after I met them they said, “Oh, I’ve been getting your emails. I’ve been watching your videos. I’ve seen your posts, but I’ve never commented on one. I’ve never even liked one.”
I built that no like and trust so that people buy from people. They know and trust, and you as an MSP can build that trust. With people, let’s face it, if you can be the second person on every business list in town, sooner or later, whoever they’re working with, is going to tick them off and they’re going to be looking for the next available MSP. If it’s you, you get that call first.
Don’t worry about all of your engagement on social media. Is it important? Yes. However, don’t obsess about it. If you put the content out there consistently, you will absolutely reap massive rewards.
Laura Johns:
20:46 I think that’s very important to note that a lot of times when I’m just consulting with my clients, and this is the same thing for MSPs and IT companies with their clients, that when you’re starting, you’re going from coal.
Now, a lot of MSPs and IT companies build there, and I’d love to know how many organizations represented here today have built their business off of referrals.
At some point, you will have to come to a crossroads where you have to figure out why the referrals will dry up at some point, or you may decide that they don’t drive completely. However, you do get to decide if you want to take your business to the next level. That isn’t always where the referrals can get you alone.
21:39 Strategically, you have got to build relationships from freezing cold. You’ve got to start at the very beginning. Going back to that first date, if I’m on a first date, we won’t get married on a first date. There’s a reason for that. Some people might, but we don’t, maybe if you’re in Vegas, I don’t know.
You have to build a relationship and use those tools to do that with your customers like with these tools that you’ve been talking about. Just one phone call or email is not going to do the trick. It’s a relationship that you’re building. It’s trust that you’re building.
I’ve been a very avid follower of yours for quite some time, so I’m glad that we’ve been able to start building a relationship with each other. Hearing from you does build significant trust and being in front of your customer at all times is something that we can do relatively much easier today than we could 10 years ago to utilize these tools.
22:56 We’re going to move on to operational efficiencies and talk about that a little bit. If you have questions, go ahead and drop them in. We’ll save time at the end for questions. I would love to hear from you guys. I want to talk about how we did. You mentioned briefly earlier about taking something if you want to analyze data or do something a little bit more complex, maybe statistics.
I know that white papers are huge in our industries, obviously in case studies, spreadsheets, things like that. Can we talk about just how to get from point A to point B for data analysis, and can you dig a little deeper into that and what that might look like?
Jonathan Mast:
23:25 There’s so much potential here, essentially with data analysis and any type of data that we can get and put in place. ChatGPT can analyze it, and the example I like to give is imagine again, that you are able to carry on a conversation with that data directly.
You don’t have to understand all of the intricacies to do that, but you can carry on a conversation and ask it questions. If you’re trying to figure out, and again, maybe this is easy. I’m not an IT pro. So if I miss it, I apologize. If you’re trying to figure out where there’s an over utilization of a resource and that information is in the report, instead of having to dig through 17 pages to try to figure out where the numbers are, you can just upload that report and ask ChatGPT to tell me which days and times we had a spike in utilization. I can ask it to tell me which days there was a pattern?
That’s where it gets exciting. You can look at the report and go, it was on Wednesday we noticed, but then go, was there a pattern? Was there something we didn’t see and how are these correlated?
24:34 One of my favorite stories, even though it’s not related directly to MSPs, is in the study of diabetes. Recently, they just fed ChatGPT and AI models like 40 or 50 years worth of research. They said, please reanalyze this and identify connections that we may have missed, and ChatGPT came up with new ways to treat diabetes that are in testing right now because ChatGPT did the research and was able to analyze the research and draw some conclusions.
The scientists and doctors were able to look at and realize that they missed that. You’re going to be able to get that same thing with your IT reports because again, if you tell it that it’s an expert network engineer and that you need it to analyze this in that context, it’s going to have the capability to do that.
It’s going to draw some correlations. If you ask, it can help you appear to be absolutely brilliant and on top of things with your clients, even if you’ve only got a couple of minutes.
Laura Johns:
25:26 It can help you fill in the gaps where you may not have team members in this particular role. You need expertise from someone in a role that may not be what your area of expertise is, so let it perform as if it’s that team member.
Jonathan Mast:
It can do that so effectively in so many different ways. I do think operationally, that’s great. Another one that I love to talk about is standard operating procedures (SOPs).
You’ve got ways in which your team members are supposed to be interacting with your client networks, your client equipment, and all of that. A lot of times we pass that knowledge down and maybe there’s a checklist that they have. Maybe they use it, maybe they don’t, or maybe it gets updated.
However, oftentimes, it doesn’t. With ChatGPT, you can house that document there and ask it to improve it. ChatGPT already knows a lot about network engineering, maybe not as much as you do, but it knows a lot, even if you’re trying to say that we have a new engineer coming on or a new technician and here’s our process.
I’m good with bullet lists, so I may give it a bullet list and say: turn this into a checklist that my team can now use. You will need to take a quick look at it before you publish it, but it will turn what now takes you a couple of minutes to put in place into an actionable item that gives you a real resource that now your team can utilize and make sure they’re following things. There’s so many uses with what ChatGPT is available to do. Once you start using it, I think you’ll uncover lots of ways to use it.
Laura Johns:
27:06 I think that’s critical because a lot of these MSPs and their companies run really lame.
We don’t necessarily always have teams of 40, 50, 60, or a hundred people. Sometimes we’ve got a whole lot of clients that are being supported by maybe four to five, six people, or less than 10, and that’s a very normal size for an MSP. I think that is where you really need to start thinking as a business owner– where can I plug in some SOPs?
27:59 Find the team member that you feel like does this particular task the best, and maybe the most ideal way on our team and have them utilize a resource like ChatGPT to start the development of those. That, to me, is one easy way to get a lot more out of not just your team, but out of the tools that you have.
By taking a team member that you know has got the ability to communicate and have them communicate it to ChatGPT, you’ve now got SOPs which are awesome.
Jonathan Mast:
28:38 Another area is: have you ever taken on a client that you’ve got on their network?
You didn’t set the network up, and they’ve got some equipment that you’re not entirely familiar with. Maybe their network attached storage is a different brand than you’re familiar with. In general, you know what needs to be done, but you’re not sure where that setting is in this menu. Go to ChatGPT and type in the model number of whatever it is you’re using and tell it what you’re looking for.
You will be amazed at how many times it will tell you far better than the documentation will and exactly what to do. I’m notorious for running a business in QuickBooks. I hate QuickBooks guys. I’m not an accountant. I can never find the menu item I want like why couldn’t you put invoicing in a big button at the top because that’s what I want to use it for.
29:21 But if I go to ChatGPT and I ask “how do I get to the invoicing menu to create a new invoice for my client in QuickBooks online?” It will give me click here, click here, click here, and I realize that it’s three clicks instead of one, but now I know what they are.
Your team members can do the same thing, whether it’s a NAS, a switch, a router, or some other piece of equipment like a firewall. Instead of having to go find the documentation online, read through the documentation and try to figure it out. You can do that. The other part we’re talking about is data analysis.
Maybe you find that PDF online for the documentation or for the router that you need, and you’re thinking that you’ve got to work through this whole thing. Instead of doing that, just upload it to ChatGPT and say, “based upon the documentation, how do I do this?” It’ll read that pdf for you and tell you now your technicians just saved tons of time.
There are no more excuses for people saying that “it took me an extra hour because I had to download the documentation, read through it, and I wasn’t sure because that’s a different brand of router or switch than we normally use.” No. Now tell them to download it, upload it to ChatGPT, and ask ChatGPT to read it for you and give you the answer.
Laura Johns:
30:27 So maybe it would all serve us better. I would venture to say probably out of 10 times that you’re looking for the answer to something you go to Google versus ChatGPT?
Jonathan Mast:
I rarely if ever use Google any longer.
Laura Johns:
If ever you were able to get everything you need, transitioning our brains and the way that our teams work to think about ChatGPT as a resource for knowledge versus Google, you’re going to still have to do the work to find what you’re looking for on Google versus you do have to communicate with ChatGPT by taking a document, uploading it, getting what you need out of it. We could start investing time in that when we’re training our teams and teaching them how to work smarter with AI tools versus trying to teach them.
I’m not saying that teaching them how to do the work’s not important. Obviously that comes first, but then teaching them how to do that. If we spent just a couple of days investing in that upon the onboarding of a new hire, that, to me, is giving a gift to your employees.
In my opinion, you’re giving them the ability to think in a way that really is going to shape the next generation of employees and workers.
Jonathan Mast:
31:56 One more tip on ChatGPT that we talk about a lot is that there’s also some other tools. However, one that we rarely talk about that in my mind is hugely helpful for things like this is called perplexity.ai.
It’s essentially what I think Google should have done with AI. I won’t make any bones about it. I think Google missed the boat on AI. That’s why they renamed the bar to Gemini. It’s why it still doesn’t work as well, but perplexity.ai is a very simple concept.
When you go to Google, it gives you a list of sites, just like Laura was talking about. You’ve then got to click each one to figure out which one’s relevant. Perplexity.ai does the same thing except it actually looks at all of those and gives you the answer. Imagine going to Google and asking “how do I make chocolate chip cookies for tomorrow at the office?”
32:42 Instead of having to look through seven different recipe sites to figure out what recipe to use, it’s going to do that for you and show you the most popular chocolate chip cookie recipe. It’ll also still give you the sites if you want to go look at them but it also gives you the answer and that can be as the same thing we’re talking about.
It could be a NAS system, a router, a switch, a PC, you name it. You’re trying to figure out how to reset this to factory defaults? Go ask Perplexity and it not only will give you the answer, it’ll also give you a video on YouTube that you can watch if you need a step by step.
Laura Johns:
33:14 Make sure you take advantage of that. We’ll have some more tools to share here in a minute.
We’ve talked about where to start. Now, we’re going to talk about thought leadership. I would say if I have one challenge as a marketing service provider for IT companies and managed services providers, it’s that a lot of times, they’re either too busy, don’t like to be in front of a camera, are not willing to, or don’t like to create video content beyond written content.
33:59 We’ve already talked about marketing content from a social media standpoint: writing blog posts, SEO related content. However, how can we utilize AI and content creation for thought leadership to really position yourself as a thought leader so that you’re going to be top of the search when someone is searching for your business.
How can we leverage AI to increase our ability to reach more people through thought leadership? Video comes to mind, obviously we’d love to talk about that, but I want to understand how that is something we can utilize AI for, and then how does that tie into generating leads?
You just mentioned that you’ve been able to accelerate your business just by hopping on video every day. So let’s talk about that for a little bit.
Jonathan Mast:
34:49 So video, I know nobody likes it. I want to remind you that when you were a baby and learned how to walk, you fell down a bunch of times. However, you didn’t stop trying because everybody around you was walking, and you desperately wanted to be able to run away from mom.
You figured it out and you kept falling until you became good at it. Then, you left with glee when you were able to outrun mom and run around the corner faster than her. Video is the same way. When you start recording a video, it’s gonna suck. You’re gonna stink at it. However, if you don’t start by falling down, you can never get good at it.
The best time for you to start doing video was two years ago. If you didn’t do it two years ago, the next best time is today. Every one of you has something in your pocket or on your desk that can do it for you, and that’s your mobile phone.
35:43 What Laura is talking about is that if you just do a Google search and search for a managed services provider, Google’s going to tell you down in the “people also asked” section what questions people are asking about that topic.
You can also go to a site called Answer the Public. There’s another one called Ask Socrates. They all do the same thing. You put in a topic, and it’s going to give you the questions that people ask. Here’s the beauty: you don’t need AI to answer them. You know the answers, but you can use that tool.
Then if you’re not sure what to say, do it just like this.
36:42 I don’t know if you can see my screen. It’s thinking. ‘So ChatGPT, I want to create a short form Instagram reel style video script just for my voice on how to explain what a network attached storage is. Help me with that.’ I’m going to turn my volume up.
ChatGPT:
Absolutely. Let’s break it down into something digestible and engaging for an Instagram reel. Imagine, you’re telling a story to a friend who loves movies, but struggles with storage space on their devices. You, with an expression of having a lightbulb moment. For all your favorite movies and photos, imagine having a magic box that holds everything for you. Gesture like you’re unveiling something amazing. Meet network attached storage or net.
Jonathan Mast:
37:35 I won’t finish it, but we can just tell it what we want and it’ll now give us a script. Then you can use a tool, a teleprompter on your phone, I use one called BigVu.
You don’t have to use that. There’s others, but when you hold your phone up, you read it off the screen and the selfie camera records you doing it, so it looks like you’re doing it. I know it may not be perfectly produced, but let me tell you, user generated content gets so much more interaction than professional.
You can set up in a studio and everything there and that’s fine. However, basic user generated content rules today are what’s going to appeal to people. It’s going to make sense. Go to the people-ask sections. Answer those questions. If you don’t want to do it in video, at least type it out in social media posts and say, “hey, somebody was asking me this.”
However, video will absolutely expedite your business. If you’re trying to figure out how to bring on new clients, and how to outdo your competition, they’re not doing video, especially the MSPs. If you start doing it, you will absolutely dominate.
Laura Johns:
38:40 I will say too that some of my MSP client owners are not comfortable getting in front of a video, which is fine, but obviously I’m personally a fan. I like video. I know you said nobody likes it. I kind of do. I think Jonathan, secretly, you kind of do too.
Jonathan Mast:
I do now, but I did put it off. Back in 2018, I had a goal of doing a daily video. In 2019, I had a goal of doing a daily video. In 2020, we had COVID.
I had time, and I had a goal of doing a daily video. I didn’t start doing daily videos until October 7th of 2022, and I only wish now I’d started back in 2018 because I’d be four years in.
Laura Johns:
39:19 I think one thing to consider is the person in the video doesn’t have to be you. It can be a team member, maybe it’s your sales team leader, somebody in marketing, or maybe someone else on your team that is tech savvy. It doesn’t always have to be you.
You can certainly make cameos. You can show how you are a thought leader, but you can also utilize other team members in this effort to 100 percent help you gain exposure. Don’t feel like just because you feel crippled every time you step in front of a camera that it can’t be done. We can certainly find workarounds.
What are your favorite video tools to use just day to day? I think I’m using the same caption tool on myself.
Jonathan Mast:
40:11 On my phone, I use a tool called Captions. It doesn’t have the best name, but it’s an amazing piece of software.
On my computer, I use one called Descript. If you want to do that, here’s a great platform. Video editing is no fun unless you’re one of those people that loves it, but most of us don’t. It’s also going to be hard because you’ve got to look at the timeline. You’ve got to zoom in. You’ve got to zoom out. The learning curve is high.
With Descript, you can go to anybody on your team that has time, and if they can edit a Word document, they can edit your video because it brings up the transcript. You can quite literally go through and copy and paste and move things around by moving the text and it rearranges the video. It is an amazing tool.
I definitely recommend Captions on your phone and Descript on your computer. They’re both amazing. By the way, Captions is limited to a five minute video. That’s why I have Descript because if I’m going to do a longer form one, do that. The other thing I want to add is that you should add the captions to your video because studies show that while the average adult is spending nearly three hours a day watching video on this, they’re doing it with the sound off.
They’re probably like me where my wife’s watching a channel or you’re at work and turn the captions on so that people can read what you’re saying which will make your engagement go through the roof.
Laura Johns:
41:28 If anyone follows The Business Growers on social media, you’ll notice we’ll have small clips of this exact webinar that we are in right now.
Grace on my team takes it, puts it in these scripts, splits it up, and gets great little nuggets out of it in minutes. It’s a great tool, and I love it.
Jonathan Mast:
42:05 Garrett asked a great question here: “what do I use for organizing my prompts?”
Since you get so many prompts over time, it’s really difficult to find a way to do that. I have two tips for you. One, I have a separate bookmark that I literally bookmark the prompts I want to go back to because I don’t want to go back to all of them, so I have a tab for that. I just use it right in my browser.
The other thing that I found to be really helpful is a tip I got in my AI group the other day. With ChatGPT, you can set up what are called custom instructions, and it basically has two answers: Who are you? What do you want it to know about you? And two, how do you want it to respond to the response section?
I start by putting in every response with a time and date stamp, and now when I go back, I generally remember that I was working on this prompt for Laura and it was on Tuesday or I can look back and figure that out. I can also go back and can easily find those chats that I did that day.
I use ChatGPT all the time. I hit limits all the time, but even I can go back and look through a day’s worth of chats in 30 seconds which I find to be super helpful.
43:16 The other thing is if I’ve got prompts that I’m gonna use regularly, I put them into Evernote.
I’m an old guy, so I know Evernote’s old. It’s not any of the others, but I put it in Evernote so I can find it just like that, and I can find it when I need it.
Laura Johns:
I was just gonna say, I do see the question about resources available for MSPs interested in getting started with AI marketing.
If you registered for this webinar and didn’t unsubscribe, then we have your email address. We are going to be developing tools now. Granted, as soon as you develop something, like you said, the best thing to do is not necessarily develop the specific detailed GPT, but more of a kind of a guideline.
Earlier you said you have three different frameworks, so we will certainly be developing that for MSP clients and can get those that are subscribed.
Jonathan Mast:
44:13 Another question out there is what are our thoughts on building a bot with ChatGPT?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean there. Chatbots in a traditional way which I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of, they’re okay. You can put one on your website and they’ll do okay. However, they take a lot of work guys. I’m working on a lead chatbot right now that works to go out and connect with people on LinkedIn and there’s so much testing involved to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid.
It’s a lot of work, but you may be referring to custom GPTs because you mentioned bubble.io. Custom GPTs are absolutely amazing because they give you the ability to upload proprietary data that you have on your company and your clients and then tell ChatGPT to use all of the information that you have, but to use our information first.
Imagine that you’ve got your customer service team or your help desk team, and they’re looking to figure out how to answer this question about antiviruses. You may have a way in which you want that answered. Instead of going through your employee manual or the guidelines that are in the binder that’s four inches wide that nobody’s looking at anymore, you can put this into a custom GPT.
45:19 While the client’s saying, “I really need some help with this.” You can get someone to type that question into the custom GPT, and just like that, it’s going to give them the answer that was on page 436 in the third paragraph because it knows it and all that your employee or help desk person had to do was ask that question and it got it right back.
So, yes, I highly recommend you look into custom GPTs like bubble.io. For those of you who don’t know, there’s two ways to do a custom GPT. You can either do one within ChatGPT itself, or you can do one as a third party app and then connect to the API. In a perfect world, I prefer to develop it on a third party app, even though I’m not a developer, because I can then connect to open AI’s API.
I can connect to Bards API. I can connect to quads API. I can connect to mid journey. I can connect to all these different API engines. In the future, as things change and they will, when the new player comes on the board that I want to connect to, I can connect to them.
46:18 Also, I think everybody in the IT field can relate, I have much better security. If I have an app that I’ve managed and that control, I’m not trusting that my instructions aren’t getting leaked out to somebody else, or that my company data is not getting leaked because I’m storing that in my application that nobody has access to.
I didn’t give it bubbles.io, which is a great tool, because it’s a no code way to do that. Even a marketing guy like me, and I know nothing about programming, can create one using bubbles.io, so I do love custom GPTs.
Laura Johns:
Thank you for your question. We have advice for MSPs who want to stay ahead of the curve and leverage AI effectively.
Jonathan Mast:
47:02 The thing I want to encourage you here is don’t go and invest in courses. Don’t go and invest in guides that say, here’s 387 prompts that you can use in the MSP business.
I’ve invested in lots of them, mainly to validate my point that they simply aren’t worth it. I’ve bought dozens of courses and most of them are not worth it. I have one that’s great and the reason it’s great is because he updates it every single month, but it’s the only one of the courses I’ve ever bought that gets updated every single month. Therefore, I think it’s a great course now, but the downside is it’s money every month in order to do that. So that’s a downside, but don’t try to learn AI by buying a course that was done two months ago or two years ago.
I’m going to burst a couple of bubbles here, but don’t worry about the AI certification programs. The people that are putting them out have credibility. In other words, if you’re a university and you have the ability to put out a credible program, that probably means your program was written last summer, and that’s totally irrelevant in the AI world.
That may be close enough if it was in the past year, but in AI, that’s like looking at what we did when we had DOS on our computers without hard drives. Things are changing that fast. If you’re an educator here, I apologize, but higher education operates too slow.
48:26 Again, that’s what I would recommend there. I have a group that’s free. If anybody wants to join it, we teach people about prompting. I don’t know if we can give that link or not, but we’ll do that. I have gotten a lot of great tips from it.
However, we don’t sell anything here. We don’t sell any services. It’s just for education. It’s got 60,000 people in it, so you get some weird things occasionally, but it’s there.
There are a lot of other places like that. There are so many great resources, but ultimately to answer your question, what do you do to stay ahead?
I would start using ChatGPT regularly to just experiment with it, ask it questions, and if you’re not sure, this is something everybody forgets, myself included. How do I do this with ChatGPT? Go ask it and say: I want to do this. How do I do that or give me a prompt that will do this for me. Then, it will do that for you.
Laura Johns:
49:34 In terms of hiring, are you seeing the next wave of hiring for AI now? Are we hiring people who are prompt masters? Are you starting to see that?
I know that maybe in the MSP and IT world, we’re not quite there yet, but I know in marketing, we certainly are. I’m just interested to hear what you are seeing in terms of the changing of roles in organizations with the adoption of AI.
Jonathan Mast:
I don’t know if many people are hiring for prompting experience. I’m sure there are some, but I don’t see a lot of that happening. What I do see happening a lot and get a lot of questions about is what we call a virtual CAIO officer. Instead of just a chief information officer, it is a chief AI officer. The reality is much like you, MSPs, most of your clients can’t afford a full time CIO.
Most businesses can’t afford a full time chief AI officer either, but there are a number of businesses out there, I’m part of that as well, that are offering a virtual chief AI officer. For a few hours a week, somebody comes in for a leadership retreat and talks to your team about AI and understands your business.
50:52 Those things I’m seeing growing quite a bit. Laura, the prerequisites that I would give to your team there and your viewers: don’t hire based on their ability to prompt well because that prompt is going to change over time. If you need that, you need to hire somebody that understands your business. It’s like if you’re going to hire marketing, you want to hire Laura and team because they get marketing for MSPs.
You don’t want to hire somebody that specializes in the home service industry. It’s different.
Same thing here. You want to hire somebody that understands your business first. Think of a CIO role. While a CIO probably knows how to do a lot of things technically, their real skill is how to leverage technology within your business and how to understand how to use it within the business to help it achieve its objectives. However, they don’t necessarily know exactly how to program a switch. The same thing with a chief AI officer or a virtual chief AI officer. You want to look for someone that understands business so that they can help you figure out how to leverage your business to make the most sense.
As we mentioned earlier, what about taking jobs?
52:10 AI is not going to take many jobs away, folks.
Here’s what will happen. People that embrace AI and learn how to use it will take jobs away from people who don’t learn how to use it.
It’s the same thing when the PC came out. I’m old enough to remember those days. When PCs came out, there were a lot of people that said that they were just not going to use those. Well, those people lost their jobs because they had to do it.
Laura Johns:
Okay, I know that everyone here now wants to follow you and stay in touch with you.
Can you tell us where to find you if someone’s looking to keep up and watch your daily videos? I haven’t achieved posting daily yet. I’m posting about two or three times a week. Maybe next year will be my everyday year, but I’m getting there.
Jonathan Mast:
53:07 You’re doing great and that’s helpful.
If you want to follow me, the easiest way to do it is just go to jonathanmast.com. That’s jonathanmast.com/linktree. You’ll see connections there to all the resources. I’ve got free resources there. I’ve got ways to connect with me and ways to book time. You can also go to my corporate site, which is White Beard Strategies, but that’s a lot more to type. My name’s easier to remember so just go there and connect. You can find me all my social media links there.
I spend a lot of time on both LinkedIn and Facebook. You’re welcome to connect with me. You’re welcome to ask questions. My goal, Laura knows this, is that I want to add value and that’s how we’ve grown the business. If I can add value to you, please ask away.
Laura Johns:
53:49 If all these marketing tools that he mentioned sound amazing, but also sound quite overwhelming, this is what we do every day for our clients. I have the opportunity for anybody who wants to do a growth session to learn how we can move your business forward with marketing.
For those that attended this webinar, I’m so thankful that all of you came today. I know that people will enjoy this. For months to come, we’re going to be able to promote this and send it out to those that registered and our email list.
But thank you, Jonathan. You’re always a pleasure to get to hang out with, and I hope we can have a part two sometime soon.
Jonathan Mast:
I would love to. Just let me know, that would be great. It would be fantastic.
Laura Johns:
Thanks so much. Thank you for joining everyone.
